Stranger Things in Democracy
My world is full of culture shock these days. Not only did a woman in Karma Club raise what I thought was a long-dead issue in our room today--that her support for Trump dated back to when he pointed out that Barack Obama was not a natural born American--but CNN canceled Brian Stelter’s “Reliable Sources” show, forcing Brian to leave the station. I’ll discuss these in order.
In the Karma Club, we were talking about where the energy would come from in the midterm election. On the Democratic side, registration for the primaries has increased by 76.4% over the previous highest turnout. On the Republican side, I don’t have the numbers of registrants, but if you follow the money, the most money has been spent so far against Mehmet OZ, and for Ron Johnson. That doesn’t tell me who will actually come out to vote, however. It just indicates energy on both sides of the kind pollsters can’t measure. So far Mark Kelly is ahead 8 points in Arizona.
So the woman in Karma Club volunteered that she was still a heavy Trump supporter, and had fallen in love with the Orange Man when Trump accused Obama of not producing his birth certificate. In this woman’s mind, Obama was not a natural born American because his father was Kenyan. For her, this opened up the question of whether he was eligible to be president.
She insisted she was not a racist, so I went looking for other explanations.
I had never seriously considered what constituted a natural born citizen, so I immediately looked it up and discovered that the Founding Fathers had not bothered to define the term either, but had simply made the requirement to be one part of Article II of the Constitution. “No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible for the office of President…”
So since this isn’t spelled out, how did the legal system define “natural born citizen?” Welp, it wasn’t defined until the 2003-4 Congressional session, when Congress passed the Natural Born Citizen Act, codifying the consensus of early 21st-century constitutional and legal scholars together with relevant case law, that natural-born citizens include, subject to exceptions, those born in the United States.
That does make Obama a natural born citizen, although in order to find out for certain, you would have to go down the same rabbit hole I went down.
And what you find out, if you try to assume some of the most ardent Trump supporters are sincere, is that the rabbit hole often starts above ground, with some muddy piece of information everyone takes for granted --until someone doesn’t.
Okay. And now on to CNN and Brian Stelter. Stelter has been a highly regarded media critic and reporter since he came to the station from the New York Times in 2013. He actually started a TV newsletter in his college dorm room in 2006 and sold it before he graduated. Apparently he is part of a management change at CNN to make the network more centrist (or straight news) and less opinionated. And because the news media as an industry is considered “left,” I guess reporting on the news business fell into the same category. At least Stelter’s reporting did, because he had often been critical of Trump’s disregard for journalism.
You will forgive me if I find some of the recent happenings frightening. The only show left that will analyze the news business is on Fox. The business itself has been shrinking, and before we know it, everything will be streamed to us from Discovery or Disney+.
In other words, it will be entertainment, packaged for us by our corporate overlords.
Please excuse my snark today. Clearly I belong to a bygone era about which no one cares any longer: the era of American democracy and the journalism that is necessary to protect it. I take very seriously the role of journalism as the fourth estate.